A solid-state drive (SSD) is a media that uses flash modules so as to save info. The solid-state drives remain fairly new and more pricey than the standard hard disk drives (HDD), yet they're much faster, so they are quite often employed for Operating Systems and apps on both home computer systems and web servers. An SSD is preferred as it doesn't have spinning disks which limit its speed and can even cause overheating like it could happen with an HDD. Most companies work with SSDs for caching purposes, so all of the website content that is accessed more frequently will be held on such drives, while all other content will be located on regular HDDs. The main reason to use this kind of a configuration is to balance the cost and overall performance of their website hosting platform and to lower the load on the HDDs resulting from numerous reading and writing processes.
SSD with Data Caching in Cloud Web Hosting
The cloud platform where we make cloud web hosting accounts uses only SSD drives, so your web apps and static sites will open extremely fast. The SSDs are used for files, email addresses and databases, so regardless if you load a page or check for new email messages using webmail, the content will load promptly. In order to offer even better speeds, we also use a group of dedicated SSDs that work only as cache. All content that generates a lot of traffic is copied on them automatically and is afterwards read from them and not from the primary storage drives. Needless to say, that content is replaced dynamically for improved performance. What we achieve this way except for the improved speed is lowered overall load, thus reduced chance of hardware failures, and longer lifespan of the main drives, that's one more level of protection for any data that you upload to your account.
SSD with Data Caching in Semi-dedicated Servers
All semi-dedicated server accounts that we provide are generated on a cloud platform which uses exclusively SSD drives. We don't use HDDs any longer, so your websites will load very quickly because we employ SSDs for each aspect of the service - files, databases and e-mail addresses. Considering that some people may host websites which are more frequently visited than others, we also use many drives for caching. Our system identifies any content that is accessed more frequently and clones it on these drives in order to load it from them. This configuration is used for load-balancing purposes as we guarantee that several reading/writing intensive Internet sites will not influence the performance of the rest of the Internet sites which are stored on the very same primary drive. Using caching drives also increases the lifespan of the main storage SSDs and lowers the possibility of disk failures.